Political Seductions: The Show of War in Byron's Sardanapalus

In the preface to his play Sardanapalus (1822), Byron claims that he has "attempted to preserve . . . the 'unities.'" ¹ He has done so, fully "aware of the unpopularity of this notion in present English Literature." If the unities are no longer popular in England, they are "still so in the more civilized parts" of the world. This notion of a barbaric England constitutes a deliberate provocation in the face of frequent contemporary claims about British superiority. ² Patriots stressed that England was a free country in which benevolent monarchy had replaced the coercive violence typical of barbaric states. For many of Byron's contemporaries no state in Europe better exemplified this barbarous condition than Napoleonic France. Rejecting the patriotic view of British political benevolence, Byron claims that the British are seduced by Napoleonic barbarism and the spectacle of martial violence.

Although his play is set in ancient Assyria, it references contemporary representations of war, British monarchy and Napoleonic rule. ³ British kings, like Byron's fictional ruler, Sardanapalus, attempt to represent themselves as benevolent figures of the people who respect the freedoms of their subjects. But this claim to an almost democratic disposition only masks the fact that, for Byron, political seductions in England are conducted in Napoleonic and not democratic terms. If British monarchs, like Burke's feeble king in the Reflections, appear to hold power at the pleasure of their people, this representation is a useful ruse. For Byron, the people require a warrior leader who represents the national virility by performing acts of spectacular martial violence. Byron, more than any other writer of his time, was well acquainted with the aesthetics of violence and the importance of seduction, having created a series of heroes in his eastern tales who dazzle and enchant their followers by appearing to be endowed with a magical and explosively violent power that compels obedience. ⁴ Followers accept their submission to such a leader because he appears to be the embodiment of the community's power. ⁵ As critics have noted recently, Byron's late writings enact a critique of the popular Byronic hero. ⁶ William Hazlitt wrote about Byron that: "He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought." ⁷ Sardanapalus performs this desecration of the thing of beauty Byron has created in order to show the political consequences of hero worship.

However, this rejection of martial heroism is not a simple endorsement of the play's interest in pacifism or benevolence. Whereas critics in the past understood Sardanapalus's pacifist commitment as a humane rejection of militarism, more recently, critics such as Daniel P. Watkins have seen Sardanapalus's political stance as a refusal to take public responsibility. ⁸ Sardanapalus refuses to maintain his power through violence because, according to Watkins, he does not "admit the value of any kind of physical defense of human life." ⁹ The king fails to understand the practical necessities of power. In engaging, like Watkins, with the problem of political leadership in this play, I claim, however, that there is more at stake in the king's assumption of military power than a strategic necessity. At the heart of the Assyrian people's desire to compel their king to take arms is a superstitious belief in the magical properties of the martial leader's body at war. His merely mortal body at war becomes the visible evidence of the nation's virility. A sign of intrinsic, natural power that reveals both the leader's true interiority and the nation's heretofore hidden strength, martial violence is necessary not only for practical reasons of defense but as an aesthetic event.

This conflation between the leader's inherent power and the power of the community is a fantasy that Byron's Assyrian king attempts to disrupt by embracing his effeminacy. By effeminacy most of the characters in the play mean a thoroughgoing refusal to take up arms...